What has the UK become under the far right influence?

Seen in Threads, this quote from @david__osland sums it up pretty well:

On the upside, if you avoid dying before you're five, you can proceed via crumbling concrete schools to £60k of student debt, a gig economy job and rent that takes half your income until you claim the worst pension in Europe at an ever-increasing retirement age.
 
Mr Kobayashi said:
Yes. I was aware. But it's still a strange mindset even if it wasn't your choice. Not sure constructing a blob of militant vegans to hate is the most healthy thing.
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I couldn’t give a fuck what anyone else eats. It’s none of my business.

Stealing sheep, pouring away milk, smashing up a butchers and protesting in a steak house whilst people eat is the mark of a compete shithouse.

“Let’s all convert to Islam” in order to make the UK a better place is the most ignorant thing I’ve ever read on this forum.

THERE IS NO GOD!!!!!!!!!!
 
Trying to suggest that they’re worse off because of others, reality says it’s all about themselves.

They know it, you know it, accepting that you’ve been found to be an absolute clown just cannot compute.
 
MCFC Wirral said:
I couldn’t give a fuck what anyone else eats. It’s none of my business.

Stealing sheep, pouring away milk, smashing up a butchers and protesting in a steak house whilst people eat is the mark of a compete shithouse.

“Let’s all convert to Islam” in order to make the UK a better place is the most ignorant thing I’ve ever read on this forum.

THERE IS NO GOD!!!!!!!!!!
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I laughed out loud. Absolute plum, why the fuck am I reading this shit.

Time to go, peace be with you.
 
I think one of the problems we have is the idealisation of the past.

Not interest in the past. That's fine. I am massively guilty of it myself, I spend a quarter of my life in the 14th century, after all.

What I mean is the tacit or even expressed belief that there was some 'golden age' when everyone was happy, when children were quiet and obedient, and when a working man came home to find that a loving wife had set a three-course dinner on the table.

It was never, ever like that. There have always been poor people. There has always been crime. Many schools and hospitals were always shit. Wages were often lower, in real terms, than minimum wage today. The great mass of folk did not live in pretty cottages but in grotty slums with outside khazis. Even many of those rural cottages, when lived in by real people - as opposed to retired stockbrokers and university lecturers - were unsanitary, lit by oil lamps, had insects and mice crawling everywhere and only had an earth closet outside.

Yeah, some stuff in the past was great. I nominate steam trains, trolleybuses, and having six weeks off school in the summer when I was a kid. But generally speaking, it was fucking shite, even in the 50s and 60s, and even more in earlier times.
 
BrianW said:
I think one of the problems we have is the idealisation of the past.

Not interest in the past. That's fine. I am massively guilty of it myself, I spend a quarter of my life in the 14th century, after all.

What I mean is the tacit or even expressed belief that there was some 'golden age' when everyone was happy, when children were quiet and obedient, and when a working man came home to find that a loving wife had set a three-course dinner on the table.

It was never, ever like that. There have always been poor people. There has always been crime. Many schools and hospitals were always shit. Wages were often lower, in real terms, than minimum wage today. The great mass of folk did not live in pretty cottages but in grotty slums with outside khazis. Even many of those rural cottages, when lived in by real people - as opposed to retired stockbrokers and university lecturers - were unsanitary, lit by oil lamps, had insects and mice crawling everywhere and only had an earth closet outside.

Yeah, some stuff in the past was great. I nominate steam trains, trolleybuses, and having six weeks off school in the summer when I was a kid. But generally speaking, it was fucking shite, even in the 50s and 60s, and even more in earlier times.
Click to expand...
I'm guessing that "British Lives Matter" picture is meant to be 19th century.

So's this:
"If we cross the Irwell to Salford, we find on a peninsula formed by the river a town of eighty thousand inhabitants, which, properly speaking, is one large working-men’s quarter, penetrated by a single wide avenue. Salford, once more important than Manchester, was then the leading town of the surrounding district to which it still gives its name, Salford Hundred. Hence it is that an old and therefore very unwholesome, dirty, and ruinous locality is to be found here, lying opposite the Old Church of Manchester, and in as bad a condition as the Old Town on the other side of the Irwell.

Farther away from the river lies the newer portion, which is, however, already beyond the limit of its forty years of cottage life, and therefore ruinous enough. All Salford is built in courts or narrow lanes, so narrow, that they remind me of the narrowest I have ever seen, the little lanes of Genoa. The average construction of Salford is in this respect much worse than that of Manchester, and so, too, in respect to cleanliness. If, in Manchester, the police, from time to time, every six or ten years, makes a raid upon the working-people’s districts, closes the worst dwellings, and causes the filthiest spots in these Augean stables to be cleansed, in Salford it seems to have done absolutely nothing. The narrow side lanes and courts of Chapel Street, Greengate, and Gravel Lane have certainly never been cleansed since they were built. Of late, the Liverpool railway has been carried through the middle of them, over a high viaduct, and has abolished many of the filthiest nooks; but what does that avail? Whoever passes over this viaduct and looks down, sees filth and wretchedness enough; and, if any one takes the trouble to pass through these lanes and glance through the open doors and windows into the houses and cellars, he can convince himself afresh with every step that the workers of Salford live in dwellings in which cleanliness and comfort are impossible.

Exactly the same state of affairs is found in the more distant regions of Salford, in Islington, along Regent Road, and back of the Bolton railway. The working-men’s dwellings between Oldfield Road and Cross Lane, where a mass of courts and alleys are to be found in the worst possible state, vie with the dwellings of the Old Town in filth and overcrowding. In this district I found a man, apparently about sixty years old, living in a cow-stable. He had constructed a sort of chimney for his square pen, which had neither windows, floor, nor ceiling, had obtained a bedstead and lived there, though the rain dripped through his rotten roof. This man was too old and weak for regular work, and supported himself by removing manure with a hand-cart; the dung-heaps lay next door to his palace! Such are the various working-people’s quarters of Manchester as I had occasion to observe them personally during twenty months."

In Manchester itself:
"In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish. The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles. In short, the whole rookery furnishes such a hateful and repulsive spectacle as can hardly be equalled in the worst court on the Irk. The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten doorposts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.

This is the impression and the line of thought which the exterior of this district forces upon the beholder. But what must one think when he hears that in each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps a cellar, on the average twenty human beings live; that in the whole region, for each one hundred and twenty persons, one usually inaccessible privy is provided."
 
BrianW said:
I think one of the problems we have is the idealisation of the past.

Not interest in the past. That's fine. I am massively guilty of it myself, I spend a quarter of my life in the 14th century, after all.

What I mean is the tacit or even expressed belief that there was some 'golden age' when everyone was happy, when children were quiet and obedient, and when a working man came home to find that a loving wife had set a three-course dinner on the table.

It was never, ever like that. There have always been poor people. There has always been crime. Many schools and hospitals were always shit. Wages were often lower, in real terms, than minimum wage today. The great mass of folk did not live in pretty cottages but in grotty slums with outside khazis. Even many of those rural cottages, when lived in by real people - as opposed to retired stockbrokers and university lecturers - were unsanitary, lit by oil lamps, had insects and mice crawling everywhere and only had an earth closet outside.

Yeah, some stuff in the past was great. I nominate steam trains, trolleybuses, and having six weeks off school in the summer when I was a kid. But generally speaking, it was fucking shite, even in the 50s and 60s, and even more in earlier times.
Click to expand...
A confused country that has difficulty recognising and reconciling its past, and present with the prospect of an unrecognisable future.
 
Vic said:
I'm guessing that "British Lives Matter" picture is meant to be 19th century.

So's this:
"If we cross the Irwell to Salford, we find on a peninsula formed by the river a town of eighty thousand inhabitants, which, properly speaking, is one large working-men’s quarter, penetrated by a single wide avenue. Salford, once more important than Manchester, was then the leading town of the surrounding district to which it still gives its name, Salford Hundred. Hence it is that an old and therefore very unwholesome, dirty, and ruinous locality is to be found here, lying opposite the Old Church of Manchester, and in as bad a condition as the Old Town on the other side of the Irwell.

Farther away from the river lies the newer portion, which is, however, already beyond the limit of its forty years of cottage life, and therefore ruinous enough. All Salford is built in courts or narrow lanes, so narrow, that they remind me of the narrowest I have ever seen, the little lanes of Genoa. The average construction of Salford is in this respect much worse than that of Manchester, and so, too, in respect to cleanliness. If, in Manchester, the police, from time to time, every six or ten years, makes a raid upon the working-people’s districts, closes the worst dwellings, and causes the filthiest spots in these Augean stables to be cleansed, in Salford it seems to have done absolutely nothing. The narrow side lanes and courts of Chapel Street, Greengate, and Gravel Lane have certainly never been cleansed since they were built. Of late, the Liverpool railway has been carried through the middle of them, over a high viaduct, and has abolished many of the filthiest nooks; but what does that avail? Whoever passes over this viaduct and looks down, sees filth and wretchedness enough; and, if any one takes the trouble to pass through these lanes and glance through the open doors and windows into the houses and cellars, he can convince himself afresh with every step that the workers of Salford live in dwellings in which cleanliness and comfort are impossible.

Exactly the same state of affairs is found in the more distant regions of Salford, in Islington, along Regent Road, and back of the Bolton railway. The working-men’s dwellings between Oldfield Road and Cross Lane, where a mass of courts and alleys are to be found in the worst possible state, vie with the dwellings of the Old Town in filth and overcrowding. In this district I found a man, apparently about sixty years old, living in a cow-stable. He had constructed a sort of chimney for his square pen, which had neither windows, floor, nor ceiling, had obtained a bedstead and lived there, though the rain dripped through his rotten roof. This man was too old and weak for regular work, and supported himself by removing manure with a hand-cart; the dung-heaps lay next door to his palace! Such are the various working-people’s quarters of Manchester as I had occasion to observe them personally during twenty months."

In Manchester itself:
"In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish. The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles. In short, the whole rookery furnishes such a hateful and repulsive spectacle as can hardly be equalled in the worst court on the Irk. The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten doorposts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.

This is the impression and the line of thought which the exterior of this district forces upon the beholder. But what must one think when he hears that in each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps a cellar, on the average twenty human beings live; that in the whole region, for each one hundred and twenty persons, one usually inaccessible privy is provided."
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Engels?
 
KPXBLN said:
Engels?
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Indeed.

He even directly addresses the "idealised" view in that picture. (An idealised view in 1844!)

"Here the centralisation of property has reached the highest point; here the morals and customs of the good old times are most completely obliterated; here it has gone so far that the name Merry Old England conveys no meaning, for Old England itself is unknown to memory and to the tales of our grandfathers. Hence, too, there exist here only a rich and a poor class, for the lower middle-class vanishes more completely with every passing day. Thus the class formerly most stable has become the most restless one. It consists to-day of a few remnants of a past time, and a number of people eager to make fortunes, industrial Micawbers and speculators of whom one may amass a fortune, while ninety-nine become insolvent, and more than half of the ninety-nine live by perpetually repeated failure."

www.gutenberg.org

The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 with a Preface written in 1892

www.gutenberg.org
 
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Vic said:
Indeed.

He even directly addresses the "idealised" view in that picture. (An idealised view in 1844!)

"Here the centralisation of property has reached the highest point; here the morals and customs of the good old times are most completely obliterated; here it has gone so far that the name Merry Old England conveys no meaning, for Old England itself is unknown to memory and to the tales of our grandfathers. Hence, too, there exist here only a rich and a poor class, for the lower middle-class vanishes more completely with every passing day. Thus the class formerly most stable has become the most restless one. It consists to-day of a few remnants of a past time, and a number of people eager to make fortunes, industrial Micawbers and speculators of whom one may amass a fortune, while ninety-nine become insolvent, and more than half of the ninety-nine live by perpetually repeated failure."

www.gutenberg.org

The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 with a Preface written in 1892

www.gutenberg.org
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As it happens I actually met Engels once, when I was in my mid-20s. We had a great conversation and I think he learned a lot from me. (I was on acid at the time, to be fair.)
 
Vic said:
Indeed.

He even directly addresses the "idealised" view in that picture. (An idealised view in 1844!)

"Here the centralisation of property has reached the highest point; here the morals and customs of the good old times are most completely obliterated; here it has gone so far that the name Merry Old England conveys no meaning, for Old England itself is unknown to memory and to the tales of our grandfathers. Hence, too, there exist here only a rich and a poor class, for the lower middle-class vanishes more completely with every passing day. Thus the class formerly most stable has become the most restless one. It consists to-day of a few remnants of a past time, and a number of people eager to make fortunes, industrial Micawbers and speculators of whom one may amass a fortune, while ninety-nine become insolvent, and more than half of the ninety-nine live by perpetually repeated failure."

www.gutenberg.org

The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 with a Preface written in 1892

www.gutenberg.org
Click to expand...

That could almost have been written today. The only point I would make is that 'Merry England' has always been a fantasy. A nice fantasy, but a fantasy.

The best time in human history was (roughly) 1945-1980. Then we screwed up. Mainly because some rich folk decided they weren't rich enough and it wasn't fair.
 
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